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Hindi Streaming’s Dry Run: Fewer Shows, Lower Budgets and Creative Challenges
While there was no lack of memorable storytelling and promising ideas in OTT shows last year, there were very few standout, game-changing series.
The Indian streaming landscape is in a state of flux. As per multiple accounts from showrunners, screenwriters, actors and producers, the OTT ecosystem is going through something of a transition with the industry stepping into a “new normal” of fewer major streamers with lower budgets looking to make fewer meaningful, distinctive, boundary-pushing shows. As a result of this period of economic soul-searching and business model tweaking, 2024 was a year of crippling uncertainty and languishing for much of the creative community.
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“I’ve been around for a while.... These are the darkest times that I have seen,” said Sudip Sharma, the creator of critically acclaimed shows like Netflix’s Kohrra (2023) and Amazon Prime Video’s Paatal Lok (2020) — on the Streaming Show podcast in July 2024. In a later episode of the same podcast, actor Jim Sarbh said: “Every second actor you talk to says, ‘I’m not even going to ask about work because it’s dry.’ Everyone is feeling the pinch. And that’s just the actors. You talk to writers and they say no show is being made…. It’s a very uncertain time.”
These statements lead to the question: Is Indian streaming starting to run dry? The last five years has seen a spate of 6-to-10-episode series from the leading streamers — Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ Hotstar, Zee5, JioCinema and SonyLIV. The format has come to be referred to by many names. Cinematic TV. Prestige TV. Or more reductively, “web series”. A streaming executive once referred to the format as “cerebral content”.
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While 2017 was the year of the first Indian original series from a major streamer with Amazon Prime Video’s Inside Edge, with Netflix following suit in 2018 with Sacred Games, 2019 was the landmark year that set the stage and ushered in the current era. It was the year that defined the benchmark for what a Hindi streaming show could be, with the first seasons of The Family Man, Made in Heaven, and Hostel Daze from Amazon Prime Video, as well as Delhi Crime from Netflix, and Kota Factory from TVF. Not to mention gems like Little Things Season 3 and Laakhon Mein Ek Season 2.
In the years since, while the big screen continues to go through a period of creative crisis and looming uncertainty (supercharged by the pandemic) and linear TV continues to pursue low-hanging fruit, the streaming series format provided a playground for some of the country’s finest and most distinctive filmmaking voices. The likes of Raj & DK, Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti, Sudip Sharma, Vikramaditya Motwane, and Hansal Mehta, to name a few, started to think in terms of cold opens, cliff hangers, episodes and seasons. They could tell the stories they wanted to, free of the trappings and commercial considerations of a mainstream Hindi film.
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The OTT series boom similarly empowered plenty of new voices like Sumukhi Suresh (2017’s Pushpavalli), Dhruv Sehgal (2016’s Little Things) Puneet Krishna (2018’s Mirzapur), Sidharth Sengupta (2022’s Yeh Kaali Kaali Ankhein), Ishani Banerjee (2023’s School of Lies), Chandan Kumar (2020’s Panchayat) and Abhay Pannu (2021’s Rocket Boys), to name a few. Not to mention the significant strides taken within the world of casting and the sea of new acting talent that the OTT era has platformed, put on the map or discovered.
In short, India’s streaming wars rewarded, or at least enabled, innovation, ambition and diversity. Explosive, bingeable populist pulp (Mirzapur, Maharani, Special Ops) could co-exist with prestige (Paatal Lok, Black Warrant, Tabbar) and coming-of-age dramas (much of the work of TVF and Dice Media). There was a willingness to take big swings (Amazon Prime Video’s Jubilee is reportedly one of the most expensive Indian streaming series ever made) and champion critically acclaimed underdogs (Pushpavalli, Guilty Minds, Rocket Boys). Variety was the flavour of the season. Stories of all shapes, sizes and genres were greenlit. In a mad dash to grab eyeballs and onboard subscribers, OTT platforms were incentivised to churn out the most, thereby giving Indian viewers many of the most acclaimed pieces of Hindi language storytelling of the last decade.
What Goes up Must Come Down
But the bubble had to burst eventually. The economic conditions and business strategies that enabled India’s equivalent to “too much TV” and “peak TV” had shifted. Over the last year, across town, there are woes of plummeting budgets, less commissioning, shelved projects and delay tactics amidst platforms needing to “revisit the drawing board”.
A screenwriter says that close to 50 series projects in development at leading streamers were scrapped in 2024. “I think it was as bad or worse than the pandemic. There was no work coming in. In 2024, it felt like there was a lack of hope in the industry,” says a leading casting director who’s worked on numerous tentpole shows, adding, “I remember a bunch of us casting directors were speaking to each other being like, ‘There’s close to no work, how do we keep the office running?’ ”
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After years of heated competition, it was time to wake up and smell the unsustainable business model — Netflix remains the only profitable pure-play streamer in the world, while others like Amazon Prime Video, ZEE5, Jio Cinema and SonyLIV are merely side hustles of larger conglomerates. “The business model a few years ago was to throw money and get a subscriber at any cost,” Saugata Mukherjee, head of content at SonyLIV, said to Film Companion last year. “It doesn’t work and it hasn’t worked globally, where now companies are merging because the cost of content is very high and revenues are dropping.”
This has ushered in the age of consolidation and contraction for the Indian streaming wars, with media entities and platforms collapsing, colliding or swallowing each other to survive and remain competitive against the global (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video), or local (JioCinema) mammoths. Last year, Amazon acquired the free streaming platform MX Player and merged it with its own AVOD (advertising video on demand; watching for free) offering — Amazon miniTV, now called Amazon MX Player. Though the turbulent Sony-Zee merger was ultimately called off, as per multiple industry insiders, Zee5 hasn’t commissioned any new projects in the last year.
What’s more, with the successful Reliance Jio–Disney Star merger, it remains uncertain whether JioCinema and Disney+ Hotstar will remain two separate platform entities, but this could take yet another buyer off the block. Fewer players mean fewer opportunities to get a project made. With that comes fewer bold swings, and a move toward generic, safe bets to grab eyeballs. Not to mention the swelling scourge of censorship in a post-Tandav world; in 2021, Amazon Prime Video’s glossy political thriller series managed to attract several police complaints and much controversy for hurting religious sentiments. The show is considered a turning point for censorship within the OTT landscape, further dimming imaginations and restricting storytelling potential.
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According to an Ormax Media analysis, 2024 saw an 18 per cent drop, as compared to 2023, in the number of original shows to come out from the top players. And this may just be the beginning. In terms of projects currently in the pipeline, the previously mentioned casting director says: “What we’re seeing with platforms is that budgets are super strapped. We’re also seeing a crunch in the number of shows that are coming to us. The quantity has reduced, and the budgets for each project have come down…. If a leading platform would usually do 30 to 40 shows, now they are doing like 5.”
The Rise and Rise of TV Plus
The new buzzword being flung at content development teams around town over the last year is “TV Plus” — referring to “family friendly”, lower-cost, 50-to-100-episode seasons, often aimed at AVOD platforms. A far cry from the 6-to-10-episode “cinematic TV” series. It begs the question: Is the future of streaming just regular old Indian network television? Both SonyLIV (Raisinghani vs Raisinghani, Adrishyam) and Disney+ Hotstar (Thukra Ke Mera Pyaar, Commander Karan Saxena) began experimenting with the new format last year. “The rationale is that it’s essentially lower budget and more episodes, which is trying to address an audience that hasn’t necessarily been exposed to the best storytelling and would much rather watch stories that are closer home rather than something cutting edge or polished,” says Ormax Media CEO Shailesh Kapoor.
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Where does that leave audiences who have become accustomed to the calibre of storytelling on streaming? Multiple content development executives across production houses told THR India that if you already have an existing popular series “in the system” then, chances are, you’ll get a greenlight to churn out new seasons. But in the current landscape, pitching new shows and franchises is a struggle.
In this new contracted, risk-averse, franchise-heavy world — which appears to incentivise safer bets — where will the next underdog come from? A development executive at a leading production house says that over the last two years, not one of his series pitches has been greenlit by top streamers, even ones that he considers “undeniable” on paper with buzzy talent attached.
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Not unlike the promise of the multiplex back in the early 2000s, streaming was supposed to be the “answer”, a place where massy could coexist with storytelling that mattered and moved you. But, stepping into 2025 it threatens to become more of the same. “The mid-budget show is going to die, the kind of shows that people like me make,” said Sudip Sharma on the Streaming Show podcast, adding, “The party’s over.”
Hits & Misses
+ Netflix reveals Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar was the only Indian title in the global top 100 series in the first half of 2024.
+ According to Ormax Media’s estimates, Mirzapur Season 3 (30.8 million views) and Panchayat Season 3 (28.2 million views) were the most watched shows in India last year.
- Netflix remains the only major streamer to provide some transparency, whereas others remain cagey about viewership.
- As per Ormax Media, streaming continues to remain very Hindi-focused, accounting for 65 per cent of all streaming originals in 2024.
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